[Outtake] Initiative Q, Does it Deserve the Hype?

An episode of Strike Gold

Are you a startup or tech company looking for free growth, content or creative advice? Jonathan Kahn and Roy Povarchik offer up marketing & creatives advice, tips, and tricks and have fun doing it. Sometimes even without being asked too.

Josh Levine works at Zappos.com at Brand Marketing and is responsible to help market Zappos's culture externally and help small startups and companies to grow their culture organically by uncovering what they are passionate about and their core values.
In this episode, Josh shares main lessons and insights from how Zappos operates and fosters a culture of innovation and experiments. He also shares the core values and tactics that help the company become really user-centric at scale.
In this episode you’ll learn:
- Why Zappos think of themselves as a “service company that just happens to sell shoes”
- How does Zappos empower their employees to come up with new ideas (and own them)
- How to keep accountability when working with a Holacracy
- How to get your customers to feel like they are a part of something bigger
- How to create a company that truly is “customer first”-centric
- Why experiment fostering company is the key to growth
- What’s Zappos secret on-boarding process?
- The influencers formal vs informal dress code
- Zappos’ unique strategy to share information with employees

Between super growth hacks and helping brands and governments fight fake news, Commun.it a bootstrap company has managed to grow to 700k users strong.
In this episode, Ran and Netanel, 2 of the company co-founders join us to talk about building a boostrap company, fake news and how they use processes, automation, and providing value to grow their company.
In this episode you’ll learn
- How fake news work on Twitter
- How Commun.it use Quora to generate leads using influencers
- How to turn “non-convertors” into advocates
- How Commun.it use viral loops to harness user engagement to grow their audience
- How to get more testimonials and reviews using value
- How to stay sharp and prioritize

Managing Facebook ads at a scale is a whole different art than managing small budgeted campaigns.
Azriel’s Facebook Advertising agency has worked with over 100 client worldwide, including SaaS startups, eCommerce, brands and what not.
In this time, his agency has dealt with anything from zero to none- budgeted campaigns to large scale well over the 100K monthly budgets.
In this episode, Azriel shares his workflow to optimising funnels and shares tips on scaling up your Facebook campaigns (with strategies for both B2C & B2B)
What you’ll learn:
- Why Facebook’s new CBO is good for newbies and bad for experts.
- How to leverage CBO to optimize your campaigns (and why you should start now)
- Arzriel’s workflow with new clients
- What’s the on thing you have to do before scaling your campaigns.
- How to scale your campaign if you’re a B2C (or e-commerce).
- How to scale your campaign if you’re a B2B startup
- Tweaking creatives vs. tweaking budgets.

Making data drive decisions can be the difference between having your product completely fail and wining over the competition.
In this episode Otniel Ben Amara, data scientist & engineer. Co-founder of the Data Agency Dojo BI, stops by to talk to us about working with data to improve your product.
We talk about anything ranging from when should you hire your first data analysts and how to scale your team to how to query your data and finding your A-ha moment to reach product market fit.
In this episode you’ll learn:
- How to define your A-ha moment based on data
- The basics on how to think and approach your data
- How ‘Houseparty’ found their A-ah moment
- When should you hire your first data analyst
- What’s the formula to the company size-data analysts ratio.
- How to turn data into growth insights
- Why your onboarding the most crucial moment for your product

Elad Levy , now CMO of Fixel, has gone a long way to from being a marketing Junior to the Technical Marketing expert he is today.
In this episode Elad talks about his work in Fixel and gaining technical knowledge as a marketer.
He also talks about the transition from being a “tactical” marketer to adopting a wider strategic marketing perspective, how to find marketing opportunities as a small marketing team and why you should refer to yourself as a small company and not a startup.
In this episode you’ll learn:
- Why calling yourself a startup is great for investors, bad for marketing
- What are the two technical skills every marketer needs to hone
- How to prfioritize marketing efforts to spot the best opportunity
- How Fixel hacked a conference to build super targeted offers
- Why you should start with things you can automate and scale first.

Did you watch the Super Bowl? Of course you did. You wanted to see all those ads didn’t you?
In this episode , Roy & Jonathan (AKA “we”) go through the Super Bowl ads that made an impact on us - good (You did good Pampers!) and bad (yes, we’re looking at you TurboFax creepy ad!).
So what were the best commercials (and why) and who creeped us out? And who did we think just shows plain out disrespect to the legacy?
Yup, we talk about it all in the week’ episode.
Also! We were honoured to have Rise’s star and Super male model Blake Korman with us!
Here are some of the ads we’ve mentioned
Tide Superbowl ad 2018
Persil ProClean
TurboTax
Stella Artois
Wix
Pepsi
Bud Light (Game of Thrones crossover)
KIA
Pringles
Mercedes-Benz USA
Washington Post
Michelob Ultra
Bubly

Danielle Sharabi took over Gett Delivery's growth pretty early on in the product's lifetime. In the past few years, she dedicated her efforts to educate the private sector on using more 'same day' deliveries and finding the right product-market fit for the service.
In this episode, Danielle shares stories and tactics she in her 5 people team used to grow Gett Delivery. She talks about the pros and cons of building a ‘startup’ within a company, why brand matters from day one (and what it even means) and how thinking differently and being scrappy can help young companies to win the game better than huge media budgets.
Listen to the episode:
In this episode you’ll learn:
- The pros and cons of building a startup within a company
- How a team of “superheroes” think
- Why small teams with the right DNA move faster
- Why you need to become a “problem solver” and not a “problem dweller.”
- The importance of cross-company collaborations
- How to bring you A-ah moment into conferences and events.

Magali Bursztyn, now a community manager at Waze and ex-Wix knows all about working with users who don’t only use your product, but love it and want to be a part of it.
In this episode she shares from her experience how to get user engaged into a community, how to create a culture where your users are a part of your product and you are a part of their lives and how to build a brand that is human and people care about.
Listen to the episode:
In this episode you willl learn:
- How to engage users and nurture them to become part of your community
- Why sharing the process with your users builds trust and loyalty.
- The power of face to face get-togethers.
- Why your users can be the best feature compass
- How to make your brand’s personality shine on Social Media

Yan (Yanko) Kotliarski is the VP digital at Atreo and one of the most well-known Performance marketers in Israel.
Over the past decade, Yan has worked with some (if not all?!) of the biggest brands in Israel, gives talks about Facebook ads and marketing campaign.
In this episode, Yan talks about how working in Atreo has brought his understanding of the importance of strategy to a whole new level, why the original message most B2B tech startups can limit their growth and how you should start thinking about your marketing.
Listen to the episode
In this episode you’ll learn:
- Why your tech-oriented marketing message doesn’t work (even when marketing to other tech people).
- How to dig into your data to build a useful buyer’s persona.
- Why Strategy should come before tactics - even when you’re eager to start.
- Are TV & Radio obsolete?

building product for developers & lessons from Google, Slack & Twitch
Amir Shevat has definitely done some impressive things in his career.
From driving the Startup Ecosystem Development for Google
Being the director of developer’s relations for Slack (if you’re using any Slack integration - this is the man you should thank)
To his current role, where he is in-charge of building products and tools to enrich the developer’s experience for Twitch.
In this episode, Amir shares blows our mind with what Twitch really is (Future of sports and interactive viewing experience), to what marketers need to know about it, how to work with Twitch influencers and more.
Amir also shares insights from what he is learnt from working at Google, Slack, Twitch (Amazon) about process, project management and building better products for your users.
What you’ll learn:
- What exactly is Twitch
- The “Win win win” model
- Why “Alignment” is important (and what it means for your company)
- The magic of single-threaded ownership
- How Amazon reverse-plan its products
- What’s the press release method to building better products.

Michal Lupo is the Growth Product Manager of Monday.com’s , a visual project management platform that that helps you to Plan, organize and track projects in one visual collaborative space.
In this episode, Michal stops by to talk about the company’s growth processes, how they choose their focus KPI, ideate with the them and run the experimentations cycle to help growth their product’s retention and adoption rate.
You’ll get insights of how a fast growing company like Monday.com treats their growth, how its teams operates and what the day to day of the process looks like.
Listen to the episode.
What you’ll learn:
- The structure of Monday.com’s growth teams
- How the company handles their growth meetings
- How does a testing cycle looks like
- The method used to ideate, prioritise and run tests
- How does Monday.com chooses and define its KPI’s
- How Monday.com uses the ICE method.
- How to stay focused on test fasts versus testing a lot of different things slow.
Our guest:
Michal Lupu has 7 years of experience as a product manager and is currently the growth product manager at monday.com. She’s the one in-charge of making sure the team is focused on the biggest opportunities, run the most significant tests and run fast.
Prior monday.com she was a product manager at ironSource and lead her own startup called SKEEPER, a productivity app for skipping the hassle of long lines.

In this episode, Ariel Assaraf, co-founder and CPO of Coralogix stops by to share his insights on how to market to developers.
If your product is directed towards developers or CTO’s this episode is a must have. Ariel debunks that developers are an audience that is “allergic” to marketing and talks about understanding what your user really cares about.
He also shares insightful lessons on how to think different about your marketing (including your marketing stack and team structure), how to get your first big clients at an early stage and what do customer really buy from your when they sign that contract.
As a marketer, this episode is full of golden nuggets.
Listen to the episode here:
What you’ll learn:
- How to gain the trust of big clients as an early stage company
- How to really understand your audience
- Why only developers can market to developers
- What marketing channels work surprisingly well for them.
- How to change in startup culture changed the developer role in a company for goo.
About our amazing guest:
Ariel Assaraf is the co-founder and CPO at Coralogix, previously a group leader at Verint and PM at the intelligence unit 8200. Loves to contribute to good causes.
About Coralogix
By integrating log insights into the software delivery process, Coralogix streamlines the development lifecycle and empowers each one of the departments in the R&D organization (Dev, DevOps, SecOps).

In this episode, we discuss the key insights and lessons we’ve learned from our guests so far. It’s been only about ten shows since we started interviewing guests, but man, did we learn a lot.
For us, every episode has tons of value, and they’re all worth getting back to and listen to it as a whole, but after having a few conversations about past guests, future guests and what made some of the episodes so darn good, we thought it’d be cool to share some of the things stuck with us.
We talk about building communities, re-thinking process, product perfection and feature marketing - and so much more.
Listen to this episode:
In this episode you’ll learn:
- Expanding your reach by “moving” your efforts
- Why you should invest in your product community & relationships
- Leveraging ‘distribution hooks.”
- Being, so user focused you become product focused
- Quality consistency
- Why you should be humble when engaging with your community
- How to use the ‘fear of ownership’ to move big projects in an organization
- How to do “visual first - text second” website redesigns.
- The magic of brainstorming yourself with others
And more.
Big thank you and shout out to:
- Leora Golomb
- Ben Pines
- Gennady Okarin
- Roy Ben-Dor
- Tomer and Gal
- Gil Eyal
- Yoav Aziz

In this episode Ben Pines, CMO of Elementor shares the company’s journey to 1 Million users.
Ben, who joined the company before the first version of the product launches, gives insights about how they got their initial traction in a saturated market, the 1# thing the company does continuously to grow it’s popularity and the its secret sauce to its success.

In this episode the Roy Bendor Cohen, founder of Q - Behavioral Thinking, drops by to talk about the way people make decisions, and how understanding that process - can help us marketers and product people to drive user behaviour to here we want it to go.

In this episode the co-founders of Poptin, Gal and Tomer, stop by to tell us how they bootstrapped their Opt-in forms SaaS company to 22,000 users!
We’re talking about a company that didn’t raise any money - and on the first day of their beta launch already started making money. Before there was a pricing page!
Learn how an SEO agency spotted a better product opportunity, built a community around their product before even having a product, how they prioritize tasks to grow a SaaS business in a crowded market and what marketing channels actually work for them. They give us all the day to day details, the glory, the hard work and why it’s so important to give value first.
Also, they are the first guests to bring us Whiskey!
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What you’ll learn:
- The difference between a competitor heavy market and a saturated market.
- When should you pivot from agency to product
- Why starting local is a great tip for a bootstrapped company
- What “value first” means in marketing, product and community
- How to find the first blog topics that’ll bring you relevant users fast
- Why branding can be important from day one
- How to plan your features when you have a small team
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Who are our amazing guests?
Tomer & Gal, Co-founders of Poptin and best friends go way back together.
They have over Nine years of experience in the digital marketing field and internet project management. They founded Poptin together, an SEO agency and a few more digital plugins (side-projects).
Tomer Graduated with an Economics degree from Tel-Aviv University. Gal was a lawyer in the army, and graduated with a Law degree from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
They’re both young parents (Tomer having a boy and a girl, Gal having twin girls!)
Guess what? All that, and they are under 30!
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What is Poptin
Poptin is a lead capture platform that helps website owners and marketers to convert more
visitors into leads, subscribers and sales. With Poptin you can create customizable popups and widgets,
with drag and drop interface and with no coding skills. It can be installed easily in any website platform
and integrate with dozens of CRMs, email marketing software etc.
Poptin was featured on Huffington Post, Semrush, Ahrefs, Crazyegg, Business2Community, TheTopPodcast, Globes, Geektime and on some more global marketing blogs.
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Fun facts:
TOMER
1. He will never say no to a shot of Arak or Humus
2. He Played professional basketball for almost 10 years.
3. He met my wife on Taglit (which both of us didn't want to go to) when I was in the army
GAL
1. He is a sleepwalker
2. When he was 16, he ran a side hustle of selling used guitars
3. His twin girls were born exactly on my first wedding anniversary

In this episode Roy Interviews Jonathan on what is the best way to work with a creative!
Most of the time when people hire creatives, they waste their money and time. Why? Because people don’t know how to work with creatives.
They either confuse someone with a creative outlet as being a creative (designer, marketing person) or simply get the processes wrong.

In today’s episode we have a crazy special guest - Gil Eyal!. Gil did not only change the influencer marketing industry with his company Hypr, but he’s the master of influencer marketing himself - we’re talking deals with Leonard Dicaprio, Tobey Maguire, Pitbull, Lance Armstrong, Lil Wayne.
He’s here on the show to talk about how he grew Hypr and signed with some of the world’s biggest brands.
BUT(!) he’s also here to explain exactly how to run a successful Influencer Marketing campaign. From setting goals, finding the right influencers, how to structure the deal and more.

In today’s episode, Genady Okrain, founder of Momento shares his story of how he got his gif-making app to feature not only the app store (we’re talking multi-country, editor’s pick, top rank, spotlights and more) but in the Apple events and even at the Apple Store’s devices.
If you’re thinking he spent millions of dollars - guess again. We’re talking near 0 budget.

In today’s episode, Leora Golomb, founder of Fuckup Nights Israel stops by to talk about how to grow a community around an event (hint: it’s in the Why and Values), how to grow an event from 0 to hundreds of monthly attendees (budget free) and how to get A-list speakers to come to your events.

In this episode, Yoav Aziz, Head of growth at YOTPO, stops by to tell us all the little details, the nitty-gritty and the processes he and his team have used to redesign YOTPO’s website and increase conversion by 93%(!!!!).

In this episode we talk about the movie industry and how social media is shaping the shows and movies we watch. We also talk about how to never run out of relevant blog post ideas for your B2B startup blog!

In this episode we talk about Nike’s Avengers infinity War moment and why Apple’s event was truly a marketing disaster (no, not because ‘Apple is losing it’). We share insights on what you can learn from both of these gigantic brands and we go back to Steve Job’s key presentation tricks and how you can use them to build a better website.

This is an outtake Roy and Jonathan thought it was very important to discuss initiative Q. A new digital currency that’s trying to make its way Into the market by using friend bring friend tactics. We also discussed other friend bring friend campaigns and the dues and don’ts that could help you build your own successful FBF Campaign.

In this episode, we answer Roy’s Co-working space buddy on how to generate more leads and market an online march and Swag e-commence. We talk creatives, we talk audience segmentation and we talk lead generation!
In this episode we cover:
- Going into the mind of your target audience
- How to stand out (and why it’s better than being better).
- Smart targeting strategies
- Why your ads should resonate what your target audience already has in mind
- How to use analytics to choose your marketing message and ad.
- Does your audience wants to make the best decision or the best received decision by their boss.

In this very special James Bond episode. Roy Povarchik delivers on his promise and shares the Instagram framework he uses at his agency Stardom.IO, to help grow Instagram accounts to tens of thousands of engaged followers. From setup, strategy to tactics. As "Jon Kahnery" takes notes.

In this episode, we talk about upping your IG story engagement. Do big brands need to be politicly correct (and your brands opportunity!) and what’s the ROI of people’s attention span!
In this episode we cover:
Roy Povarchik tries to Master follower engagement on Instagram stories
Jonathan‘s been stealing lunches from our sponsors kitchen and creating more engagement on his contact
Do brands need to stay politically correct?
Is the value of peoples attention span more valuable than gold?
Why should let your values lead your branding and create authentic marketing
Bambi versus Lion King
The Kardashian’s
What does authenticity really mean?

In this episode we talk about influencer marketing - does it actually work is it all a sham? What it takes to use brand rivalry as a marketing method and what is the biggest creative ads strategy opportunity that nobody’s done yet?
In this episode we talk about:
-Is influencer marketing real or is it just the sham?
- what it takes to create an impact with influencer marketing (and what are the common mistakes)
- What is the one metric you should care about when choosing the influencer
- Are Brand rivalries is it worth doing?
- What is the one element that will make or break your brand rivalry campaign
- Are you hitting your emotional cues in your advertising?

In this episode, we have a special guest Ilana Fass!
We also discuss how Social media is influencing your kids in ways you didn’t even think of and is Facebook marketing dead? Or do you just suck as a marketer.

In this episode all Jonathan’s clients are obsessed with Lemonade & Dollar Shave Club!
We talk about why companies should focus on the creative process and not the outcome, and what happens when your company DNA is rotten.

In this episode, we discuss what does “narrative is the new branding” even means(?), and how would you increase sales of a well established urban branded beer at the new locations across the country. Also, some damn dark predictions about the future of VR and Social Media.

In this episode, Jonathan tricks Roy into giving him free branding & content planning advice to help him build his website.
[Sorry for the echo - we'll be moving to a real podcast studio - and then the sound will kick ass. Promise...]
We cover how most personal brands, freelancers, and small-medium business over-complicate things when building their own sites and what they should actually take into consideration when building their website.
We cover the 4 core-principles (or questions?) you need to ask yourself when planning your site's content and basically how to unfuck and unstuck yourself.
Jonathan claims he now knows what to do next with his website.
Roy claims he had fun taking over the episode and jab for almost 40 minutes.
I wonder what you'd claim.
Whatever it is - Claim in the comments!
P.S
This is a brand new podcast - so we will need your help.
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